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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Technology
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The main reason projects use it is because a plurality of people already have a discord account, and you don’t need to keep making a new account for every new forum or wiki you want to comment on, read, or post to. I don’t think this is just an issue of “critical mass” ether. Lot of people don’t really want to be handing information to every project they interact with, nor do people want to learn 30 different UIs and quirks.
It’s nature as a chat/call system first has it’s benefits in the form of printed community discussion. People feel like they’re part of a community more easily than on traditional forums and wikis, it’s just more conversational.
It’s far from a good wiki or forum, in fact it is basically non-functional as a wiki, but, as a forum and tech support line, it does work, largely buoyed by the good search function.
It’s open ended enough in it’s functionality, and enough people already know how to use plugins and bots for it, that a lot of it’s short comings can be paved over or overlooked.
It’s bloated and messy and the back end is… yah, and it’s UI and formatting are not well suited for certain tasks. But the average person is far more likely to actually use it. With a single link anyone who already has a discord account can get access to a community, post, comment, and search previous comments and questions. Not to mention that it’s easier to keep track of projects you’re interested in if they’re all centralized on a single platform.
???
Good search function? On Discord? Since when?
I have never encountered a Discord server that is useful for anything except live chat and automated notifications. Which is not an indictment of Discord; I mean, that's what it's for, and it's pretty good at it at small-medium scales.
I use Discord on a daily basis, but when I encounter a project that uses Discord, I just do not engage with it at this point. It's always a mess. Every server has its own arcane rules and mechanisms to access channels, usually with some bot commands that I need to dig through docs to learn. I don't consider it "low friction" at all, even as someone who's been using Discord for many years and always has it open.
I've seen discord communities that work like this:
Person posts a question in the main chat, people discuss it and reach a resolution, a mod, bot or sometimes the op copies the question, helpful troubleshooting and the eventual answer into a separate channel (usually one of many sorted by topic) which only sees those sorts of posts and acts as a fairly searchable faq.
That format, while labour's intensive, seems pretty effective and low friction (for a user) to me. I'm not saying it's the best tool for job, but it works and is popular which is what really matters.
I've had an impressively easy time finding particular messages as long as I had a decent idea of what servers it might have been in and at least one of the following:
Which has been way better than most other things I've bothered to search through like Reddit, Beehaw, or Mastodon (especially when it was limited entirely to hashtags). Lord help me if I want to find a particular post or comment on TikTok or Youtube.
Admittedly the only projects I’ve ever used it with were games or mods for games, but I’ve never had issue finding what I need using the search function, it’s got an ok set of search boolean, and with that I can pretty easily skim all the channels or with in a specific channel for certain things or discussions.
I like being able to filter for messages associated with particular users, messages with particular attachments or embeds, and messages before/after specific dates. I like that and you can't get that as easily anywhere else that I can think of off the top of my head (not Google, anyway).
This is what I hate about Discord. It's another account. If you don't have Discord (or do, but would rather not tie all your identities together), you need to register. What I like about Matrix is any Matrix home server can join, and it can then be used to access bridged Discord rooms, the problem of course being that many projects don't bridge to Matrix.
I know before you didn't need an account but maybe you do now?
Discord had (has?) "unclaimed accounts" which were essentially guest accounts with a custom name. Not sure how the system works nowadays, but I suppose using them would be fine for one-off visits.
Yeah I remember that's how it was, but with the phasing out of #### after your username idk if they still have unclaimed accounts.